Saturday, March 28, 2009

THE SHOCK DOCTRINE by Naomi Klein

Klein's Shock Doctrine is very impressive, teaching me some things I didn't know about the theoretical underpinnings of globalization, about Freidman and the Chicago School's involvement with the worst of South American dictators, about Dr. Ewen Cameron and his CIA-funded torture research carried out on unwitting patients under the guise of psychological treatment, and much more. Klein also surprises me with an aspect of her book that initially seems a too-clever linguistically derived rhetorical leap: the connection between electrical torture and economic "shock." But within her first 100 pages, she makes the case that sadistic repression, for which electric shock is often less a symbol than a literal description, is a necessary concomitant of neoliberal policies--or as Sylvia Plath might have put it: every technocrat adores a fascist.Klein reports elsewhere in the book that mega military contractor Lockheed Martin is acquiring "allied" companies in a macabre pattern of vertical integration. It's buying into the health care companies that treat veterans injured (conceivably) by its own weapons. So we have the spectacle of a single corporation profiting from the sale of weapons and from their use. I doubt that this example is at all exceptional.In one of her book's most eye-opening passages, Klein tells us about the Maldives, an archipelago near India that's a popular resort for the superrich, who can rent small private islands for their vacations or chill out in $5000-a-night hotels. Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes honeymooned there. The dark side of the Maldives (the only side most people who actually live there ever see) is that the country is run by a typically brutal dictator who sends his political opponents, including anyone who writes on anti-government websites, to remote "prison islands" where the accomodations are presumably less luxurious than those enjoyed by Tom and Katie and where room service includes complimentary torture. These are the kinds of places where the big winners in the globalized economy go to play.Overall, Klein's book is a depressing, shocking (sorry), important work that, like the best of Chomsky's books, presents an alternative paradigm for understanding world events (alternative, that is, to the official propaganda line peddled by American corporations and the politicians they own). It's a paradigm that understands the dark side of globalization not as a collection of aberrent side effects but as the necessary conditions for, and intended results of, the policies. It's a damning indictment of Chicago School market fundamentalism (a paradigm that, despite the current crash, is nowhere near dead) that damns not by arguing against its theory but by exposing its literally atrocious consequences around the globe. A fine and necessary book, it's also a powerful implicit argument for the superiority, in terms of morality, general prosperity and longterm stability, of mixed economies a la Germany and France. The book thus argues for Keynesianism and the Bretton Woods consensus, things that the current Friedmanite managers of the world economy despise with all the passionate, irrational hatred their religious brethren direct at the devil.

ABOUT THE TITLE

The title of this blog was shamelessly stolen by the blogger (Mea culpa! Mea culpa! Me a culprit!) from a very good volume of literary criticism, Mindful Pleasures: Essays on Thomas Pynchon, edited by George Levine and David Leverenz. (Little, Brown, 1976). As all true Pynchonians know, TP's working title for Gravity's Rainbow was Mindless Pleasures.

MY TOP SHELF: BEST OF THE BEST NOVELS

ULYSSES by James Joyce

THE TRIAL by Franz Kafka

TRISTRAM SHANDY by Laurence Sterne

THE MASTER AND MARGARITA by Mikhail Bulgakov

ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

MOBY DICK by Herman Melville

IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME by Marcel Proust

ABSALOM, ABSALOM! by William Faulkner

WAR AND PEACE by Leo Tolstoy

SENTIMENTAL EDUCATION by Gustave Flaubert

NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

LOLITA by Vladimir Nabokov

BLOOD MERIDIAN by Cormac McCarthy

THE GREAT GATSBY by F. Scott Fitzgerald

TO THE LIGHTHOUSE by Virginia Woolf

THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING by Milan Kundera

THE GHOST WRITER by Philip Roth

AUSTERLITZ by W. G. Sebald

THE SATANIC VERSES by Salman Rushdie

AGAINST THE DAY by Thomas Pynchon

SOME GREAT BOOKS MOST PEOPLE HAVEN'T READ

A COOL MILLION by Nathanael West

AUTUMN OF THE PATRIARCH by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

BEAUTIFUL LOSERS by Leonard Cohen

CAMERA LUCIDA by Roland Barthes

CENTURY OF THE WIND by Eduardo Galeano

DOWNRIVER by Iain Sinclair

FADO ALEXANDRINO by Antonio Lobo Antunes

HUNGER by Knut Hamsun

INVISIBLE CITIES by Italo Calvino

JACQUES THE FATALIST by Denis Diderot

L'ASSOMMOIR by Emile Zola

MAN IN THE HOLOCENE by Max Frisch

ON THE YARD by Malcolm Braly

POEMS OF PAUL CELAN (trans. by Michael Hamburger)

PUDD'NHEAD WILSON by Mark Twain

SELECTED ESSAYS by John Berger

THE ASPERN PAPERS by Henry James

THE ATLAS by William T. Vollmann

THE BEAUTIFUL ROOM IS EMPTY by Edmund White

THE BOOK OF DISQUIET by Fernando Pessoa

THE LOSER by Thomas Bernhard

FAVORITE POETS

Ovid

Dante

Shakespeare

John Donne

John Milton

William Blake

William Wordsworth

J. C. F. Holderlin

Percy Bysshe Shelley

John Keats

Walt Whitman

Emily Dickinson

Charles Baudelaire

Gerard Manley Hopkins

W. B. Yeats

Rainer Maria Rilke

T. S. Eliot

D. H. Lawrence

Guillaume Apollinaire

William Carlos Williams

Hart Crane

Wallace Stevens

W. H. Auden

Dylan Thomas

Allen Ginsberg

James Dickey

Philip Larkin

Robert Lowell

Anne Sexton

Pablo Neruda

Paul Celan

Seamus Heaney

Richard Howard

John Ashbery

SOME FAVORITE NONFICTION BOOKS

A HISTORY OF NARRATIVE FILM by David A. Cook

A LIFE OF PICASSO by John Richardson

A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES by Howard Zinn

AGAINST INTERPRETATION by Susan Sontag

BASIC WRITINGS ON POLITICS AND PHILOSOPHY by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

CULTURE AND IMPERIALISM by Edward Said

DISPATCHES by Michael Herr

EXISTENTIALISM FROM DOSTOYEVSKY TO SARTRE edited by Walter Kaufmann

FICTION AND THE FIGURES OF LIFE by William H. Gass

FOOTSTEPS: ADVENTURES OF A ROMANTIC BIOGRAPHER by Richard Holmes

IMPRESSIONISM: ART, LEISURE AND PARISIAN SOCIETY by Robert L. Herbert

INWARDNESS AND EXISTENCE by Walter A. Davis

LIGHTS OUT FOR THE TERRITORY by Iain Sinclair

MANUFACTURING CONSENT by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman

OUT OF SHEER RAGE: WRESTLING WITH D.H. LAWRENCE by Geoff Dyer

POSTWAR: A HISTORY OF EUROPE SINCE 1945 by Tony Judt

REMBRANDT'S EYES by Simon Schama

SEXUAL PERSONAE by Camille Paglia

STUDIES IN CLASSIC AMERICAN LITERATURE by D.H. Lawrence

THE ANXIETY OF INFLUENCE by Harold Bloom

THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE by Edward Gibbon

THE GAY SCIENCE by Friedrich Nietzsche

THE GOD DELUSION by Richard Dawkins

THE GREAT WAR AND MODERN MEMORY by Paul Fussell

THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS by Sigmund Freud

THE RENAISSANCE by Walter Pater

THE SHOCK DOCTRINE by Naomi Klein

THE SHOCK OF THE NEW by Robert Hughes

THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF REALITY by Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann